Summer fun

It is July. I am not supposed to work in July. So far I have not been in school for 3 days in July. (The wife and I took a short road trip in the convertible.) New laptops to setup, servers to upgrade, strange network cables to track down and label, software to upgrade and so on. Some of these cannot be done while school is in session or while the building is busy. So I work in July. That is actually OK with me. If I took the month off I would blow money like nobody’s business. Of course I do not work hard; after all I am not supposed to work in July.

Next week I have to move the school’s QuickBooks to a new server. I know nothing about QB and if I make a booboo it would be bad. Hopefully QB has English speaking support. Should be fun.

It is interesting the breadth of knowledge a school IT guy should know for the job. Networking, software of all types, server installation and maintenance, computer repair, wireless issues, domain controller and group policy stuff, purchasing of all the above, and so on. Too bad I do not have that breadth of knowledge. That is what I love about this job. There is always something new to learn and figure out.

This job has changed my teaching style. My students always complain that I do not show them how to do things; I make them learn it themselves, they have to read the book (OMG!), dig around on the internet and perhaps do some trial and error fiddling around. In CS it seems it is more important to be able to learn quickly than it is to have a huge knowledge base. The field is too big and changes too fast to not be able to learn quickly. Teaching kids how to learn is a lot more work than lecture and regurgitate. The average kid is not too crazy about it either; they will always take the easy way.